Pupils get creative with Adobe

25 Mar, 2018

We were delighted to welcome California software pioneers Adobe to ELSS last week. Adobe is the company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and much of the creative software that drives publishing, illustration and the internet. Adobe consultants Scott Hemmens and Niels Stevens ran a fascinating afternoon workshop for Year 7 and 8 Computer Science pupils.

Pupils were fascinated (long silences followed by whoops and gasps!) as Scott and Neils demonstrated some of the capabilities of Adobe’s After Effects and Animate – their powerful industry-standard animation and special effects software. And the men from Adobe were hugely impressed by our pupils’ knowledge, understanding and curiosity. Scott wrote on Twitter that he was “Completely blown away by how smart their 12 and 13 year olds are.”

The afternoon was wrapped up with a a prize-draw and three lucky pupils (pictured) won a three-month subscription to Adobe’s Creative Suite software, which includes After Effects and Animate and many other fantastic apps.

Orvi from Year 8 said “we learnt about traditional animation, tweening, realistic movement and 3D Parallax. I liked the part about traditional animation as I found it very interesting. Learning about 3D parallax was also interesting because I wanted to find out how to create the effect and how the multiplane camera worked.”

Year 7 pupil Elyaas wrote “we learnt how to use many things in Adobe, for example [the application] After Effects. We learnt about how Disney made cartoon films, which I was fascinated by. We also learnt how [animated] GIFs are made… and about green screens and how they are used. Overall everybody had enjoyed it and were extremely fascinated by everything, especially when Scott had managed to get a ball bouncing and when Niels got three GIFs together making them work all at one time.”

Thank you to Adobe, to Scott Hemmens and Neils Stevens. We very much look forward to working closely with Adobe in the near future and forging a useful partnership. Congratulations to our Computer Science department for organising.